‘Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize the infinite extent of our relations.’
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
The Jungle Book, which was first released in 1967 a few months after Walt Disney had died, was the last animated feature over whose production Disney presided. It was, in some ways, a significant departure from the earlier animations. Although, like many earlier films, it was based on a classic text within the canon of children’s literature, the world that Kipling had created in his jungle stories was not, like other classic texts, either the ‘Old Europe’ of the nineteenth-century realist tradition, or the alternative world of fantasy and fairy tale that had provided so much of the material for Disney films to date. Kipling’s child-orientated narratives certainly offered immersion in a very different world to that experienced by young people in mid–twentieth-century western culture but, despite the sometimes archaic, biblically intoned language, Kipling’s India was not the pure fantasy land of the Alice stories, or Wind in the Willows, or Pooh’s Hundred Acre Wood. Kipling’s jungle tales may have allowed animals to speak and borrowed from the conventions of traditional oral storytelling, but they were also tough edged, realistic in many ways, and, in their depictions of animal life, owed more to observations of natural history than many earlier sentimental nature stories. Kipling’s jungle stories were, moreover, steeped in the sensibility of the most aggrandized phase of the British Empire, displaying the manly virtues of assumed, dauntless superiority, whilst also expressing deep-seated anxiety about the nature and reach of an underlying order – or ‘law’ as Kipling termed it – that was alone capable of sustaining life in a bearable, morally apprehensible, form.
No wonder then that Disney, with his instinct for sentimental populism, was wary of the original narrative, which he urged his animators and scriptwriters neither to read too closely nor to emulate. Robin Allan has described Disney’s treatment of the Kipling story in The Jungle Book as being akin to taking a sausage, throwing away all the contents except the skin and ‘filling that skin with their own ideas very far away from the original substance’ (1999: 244). Like many of the early Disney classics, the film opens with an image of a leather bound volume with the title, The Jungle Book, embossed on its cover. Kipling’s name only appears on an inner leaf however, turned over so swiftly that it barely registers, and the chapter headings that follow bear no relation to Kipling’s narrative design, gesturing instead towards key divisions in the film’s own episodic structure.
The freedom that the film’s opening rhetoric claims from its literary antecedent suggests the possibility of a very different narrative space. Within Kipling’s story the names, both of animals and places, are signs that hold together a web of memories of past events, shaping influences, patterns of behaviour that distinguish different animal and human groups. Far from being an amorphous region, a playground for childhood exploration and adventure that is shadowed with danger, Kipling’s jungle is positioned within a set of interlocking histories, each bearing the weight of specific attachments to custom, tribe and locality. Hence, when we are introduced to the monkey tribe who carry Mowgli off to the ancient temples, the monkeys are given a specific name – the Bandar-log. The ancient, disused city they have colonized is described in detail, its different significance and meaning for humans, forest animals and monkeys clarified. With Kipling, we are reminded of how each specific landscape that is known intimately is, as Simon Schama puts it, ‘a bulging backpack of myth and recollection’ (2004: 574).
Disney’s jungle floats much more freely in imaginative space; the burden of an interlocking set of histories is removed from it and the roots, which Kipling’s names expose, that lead into the soil of specific region and locality, are largely severed. Disney’s film, for instance, concludes with the image of a young Indian girl collecting water to take back to the universalized ‘man-village’ from an unnamed river. Kipling’s specification of both the village – ‘Khanhiwara’ – and the ‘Waingunga River’ that runs near it is neither accidental nor a superficial detail adding realistic texture. To name is a primary act in human consciousness and affiliation. The history of place names – and of colonial struggles over which names should have precedence – provide a telling reminder of the centrality of naming within the processes of forming identity, memory and attachment to place.
Other aspects of the configuration of the natural world in the Disney film also contribute to this free-floating effect. Much more licence is taken, for instance, in the realistic portrayal of species characteristics than is the case for animations set on the North American continent. The major animal characters are primarily social types, whose body forms and movements are essentially caricatures of the creatures they represent, rather than naturalistic images with certain features exaggerated, as in Bambi. More extensive claims have sometimes been made, suggesting that many of the key figures in the animal cast are essentially American imports that would never naturally be found within forested regions of central Asia. Patrick Murphy, for instance, ridicules the idea that ‘Wolves, not to mention a North American bear, are major players in the jungles of India?’ (1995: 130). This may not be wholly just. The Indian variant of the wolf, it is true, had been hunted almost to extinction before the middle of the twentieth century but its habitat range was once varied and extensive; likewise the Asiatic bear, though darker and longer haired than the version shown in the film, is a plausible inhabitant of the mixture of tropical forest and more open terrain depicted in the film. Disney’s Baloo probably lacks sufficient species characteristics to make it anything other than a generic bear, while its figurative lineage could no doubt be traced more readily to Yogi Bear from the popular television series than to any naturally occurring species. But, though Kipling was no doubt aware that his cast of jungle animals were at least historically plausible, it is true that Disney’s aesthetic within The Jungle Book is deliberately set loose from such a potentially realistic base. The introduction of an orang-utan leader of the monkey people, in King Louie, suggests that social signifiers far outweigh the prescriptions of habitat range and locality in determining the presence of particular species.
If the world of The Jungle Book appears initially to stand outside the claims of both history and region however, it nevertheless opens up space for reflection on relationships between culture and nature in other ways. In what forms does this take place? The best way to begin to answer this question is to recognize the richness and potential range of the opening premises on which the narratives of both film and book are founded. For Mowgli, like his African counterpart Tarzan whose narrative would also provide the basis for a major Disney animated feature in the 1990s, is a manifestation of one of the most important archetypes enabling exploration of what is distinctively human: the child of nature. From Rousseau onwards, the idea – tempered occasionally by historical reality – of the child brought up without access to human civilization and culture has haunted Western thinking with a sphinx-like fascination. Contained within this archetype, albeit elusively, is perhaps the answer to the ultimate riddle; what is it that makes us human and what does it mean that so many of the attributes that seem to make our consciousness distinctive arise from processes of development and culture that appear to separate us from nature?
The tone of Disney’s Jungle Book is, of course, more playful than philosophical but it is worth noting that the main problem confronting Mowgli from the start of the film is precisely the reverse of the way characters’ identities are normally construed in relation to the natural world. Whereas the plots of most Western narratives seek to heal the rift between what is natural and what is shaped (or deformed) by society through engaging their protagonists in closer contact with key elements of nature (Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden is a particularly compelling example of this type), the founding trope of The Jungle Book is of a boy already immersed in the natural world. Whereas in many adventure stories the protagonist’s quest leads them into some form of natural wilderness, either in order to restore moral order or to bring back something that is needed within society, Mowgli’s ostensible problem is how to elude the pressures that would remove him from the jungle where he feels at home. Mowgli’s situation in The Jungle Book is therefore best conceived as a device which, in reversing ordinary expectations, opens viewers up to potentially fresh ways of perceiving and thinking about one of the most fundamental polarities determining human experience.
If this seems a rather grand claim for a charming but light narrative, it is worth looking in some detail at how the central device of Mowgli’s unusual affiliation to wild nature is developed in the film. In the process, we will also be able to trace how this initial device enables a range of ideas about nature and identity to be playfully integrated into the film’s overall design and reflected upon.
The most decisive problem faced by Mowgli throughout the film, and the one that drives the episodic, almost picaresque plot forwards, is undoubtedly the problem of survival. The problem emerges at the film’s opening, when, after a series of establishing shots reviewing the principal spaces within which the drama will unfold, the camera pans down the course of a jungle river to reveal a broken boat with a lone, defenceless infant wrapped in swaddling cloth in its upturned bow. The dilemma that faces the panther Bagheera at this moment is one that will be repeated in different forms throughout the film: whether to intercede, under the promptings of a nurturing and protective instinct, or to allow the natural processes of jungle life to hold sway, with the inevitable result that a defenceless creature will be (literally) swallowed up. This being a sentimental Disney comedy for children, the panther opts, unrealistically no doubt, to intervene on the defenceless human’s behalf, establishing Mowgli, after some initial difficulties, among a surrogate family of wolves. But adoption by a close-knit foster community of aggressive carnivores defers the key issue of survival only for a brief period in the film. It re-emerges under the threat of the tiger Shere Khan, which forces the wolf pack to cast out their young human charge; thereafter the survival issue acquires renewed dramatic force at successive intervals – through the predatory interest of the python, Kaa, and the aggressive bullying of the monkeys – before reaching a climactic apotheosis with the return of Shere Kahn himself. The film’s dialogue is punctuated by series of dire prognostications, expressed with a mixture of paternal concern and exasperation by Bagheera the panther, which take the form of variations on the stock phrase ‘Mowgli will never survive in the jungle on his own’.
The pervasive emphasis on this central issue of survival in the film might suggest a popularized version of Darwinian theory being deployed to shape the drama of the natural world that emerges from the jungle landscape. There is certainly some evidence within Kipling’s stories of responsiveness to the pressure of Darwinian ideas, if not direct incorporation of them. Unlike novelists such as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy and Jack London, Kipling does not seem to have been influenced directly by Darwinism and the offshoots it spawned almost immediately within the sphere of social philosophy. But Kipling’s Jungle Books do express a deep-rooted concern with the issue of what human instincts share with those of animals and with what, ultimately, differentiates the human species. These issues acquired a particularly intense and troubling focus in the wake of Darwin’s publications, of course, and though the form in which Kipling presents such issues is more indebted to ethical and religious thinking than to Darwin, the intensity of his focus suggests sharpening under the pressure of Darwinist ideas. Kipling’s particular concern is with the issue of species dominance, related but not identical to Darwin’s theory of the survival of the fittest. Kipling’s jungle, to a much greater degree than Disney’s, is an arena within which will and power are contested between the different species groups.
Disney was clearly interested in Darwinian ideas however. As Peter Viyakovic observes, ‘Disney was himself clearly fascinated by the concept of biological evolution and was enthusiastic about a “dawn of creation” sequence in the 1940 film Fantasia, which he said represented “the fight for life”’ (1996: 19–20). More recent children’s animations, such as Twentieth Century Fox’s Ice Age, make reference to evolutionary ideas in more explicit ways. In Ice Age (2002) the pre-historic animals share arch, ironic jokes with the audience about their role in the drama of evolution, suggesting that, within contemporary society, Darwinian ideas have such currency they can be played with, in complicity with even quite young audiences, rather than simply dramatized or spelled out.
Despite the apparent coincidence of thematic concerns however, Disney’s Jungle Book is not really even comically orientated towards Darwinism. Within Disney, the survival motif is deployed not to assert the pre-eminence of the human animal as ‘fittest’ in terms of adaptive capacity and power, but rather to explore the notion of dependency in relation to the maturing figure of the child. The mix of mentors and aggressors that accompany Mowgli on his jungle journey provide him with a rich environment for learning. Learning is also potentially a Darwinian theme; but what Mowgli learns is ultimately not so much a set of strategies for survival in a potentially hostile environment but rather a sense of who he is and where his destiny lies. In Disney’s Jungle Book the theme of survival provides the stimulus for what, in the film, are more compelling concerns with identity, values and attitudes towards life. Mowgli’s dependency on larger creatures provides him with a set of models for the kinds of qualities and contested values that will shape his own identity. Although, at the end of the film, the sentimental evocation of his sexual drive is decisive in determining Mowgli’s fate as a human within the ‘man-village’, this ultimate species choice is actually less significant than the differentiated modes of being offered as ‘options’ by the animals he has encountered along the way. In this respect The Jungle Book operates like a fable, using the animal forms to highlight and debate ethical and psychological issues, which the stress on survival throws into sharp and engagingly problematic focus.
Although the connection to ideas about nature in The Jungle Book may not be, in any substantial sense then, Darwinian, the mapping of psychological and ethical issues onto animal figures is not arbitrary. The key to understanding this relationship is the significance attributed to performing the self through imitation, one of the most distinctive modes of interaction portrayed in the film. For if Mowgli is to be considered anything more than a notional ‘child of nature’, purely a cipher for socially constituted forms of being for which the jungle setting is little more than an exotic backdrop, then his affinity with the natural world must be demonstrated through some significant aspect of the character’s performance. It is imitation, I will contend, that fulfils this crucial role and enables the film to engage young audiences potentially in ways that go beyond those generally available for social comedy played out in animal costume.
One of the aspects of feral children that has fascinated those who have been able to observe them has always been the degree to which such children’s physical gestures resemble those of animals rather than humans. Jill Paton Walsh’s imaginative rendering of this experience in her novel, Knowledge of Angels, provides a particularly intense instance of the extreme ambivalence such figures can create:
They closed in. Then, suddenly they could see into the hollow in the drift in front of the creature’s lair. The melt-cave at the door of the rock cave was abominable with scraps of slaughtered things – with blood and feathers and bones. Even on the nearly frozen air the stench reached them. The thing held the stolen haunch of meat between its front paws, and was worrying it, snarling like a dog as it ate. It had a mantle of matted black fur over its head and shoulders, and bluish bald hindquarters. It did not hear or smell them coming, for it did not cease to drag off strips of meat from the bone.
Galceran let out a bloodthirsty yell. He raised his snow mattock high above his head and swung it murderously. It was Jaime who stopped him. He jumped forward with a wail and, grabbing Galceran’s sleeve, deflected the blow. Then he lurched backwards, doubled over convulsively, and vomited. He had seen, just in time, that the monster was a human child. (1995: 19)
Clearly the physical manifestation of a completely ‘natural’ human being is capable of provoking feelings of profound ambivalence in those who witness it. It is often experienced as grotesque and disturbing, a transgressive image that serves as a reminder of how thin the shell of civilization within which we preserve a sense of our distinctive humanity may be. Perhaps because the detail of such animating gestures, realistically conceived, are likely to be read as disturbingly grotesque, Kipling tends to offer the physical detail of his natural child’s life in rather generalized forms, though he does dwell on the nature of the killing rituals that Mowgli shares with his animal brethren. Edgar Rice Burroughs had more taste for the grotesque and the Tarzan novels persistently attempt to titillate and shock readers with the details of animal gestures transposed onto the human protagonist in both hunting scenes and the consumption of raw flesh.
In Disney’s Jungle Book this issue might seem at first to be avoided; as a child Mowgli is not shown hunting (whether on two legs or ‘all fours’) with the wolf pack, and is certainly not depicted eating raw flesh. His interactions with his wolf ‘siblings’ are identical, in terms of gestures, to those of a boy playing with large puppies. But Mowgli’s embodiment of a desire for a substantive identity within the animal world is signalled in physical forms at later stages in the film. This desire is enacted comically, for instance, in the scene where Mowgli attempts to copy the actions of the young elephant who befriends him, when Mowgli becomes involved with ‘Colonel’ Hathi’s ramshackle troop. When the lead elephant Hathi lines his ‘platoon’ up for inspection and orders them to raise their trunks in the air, Mowgli, who has already gone down onto all fours to accompany his new-found, young elephant friend, raises his head at an equivalent angle. The comedy operates along an edge of double irony here, for the elephants’ gestures are themselves a burlesque of military ritual, while Mowgli’s attempt to merge with them positions him as a human imitating animals imitating humans. As in all good comedy, however, there are moments where it is possible to see more profound and difficult feelings being finessed. Mowgli’s precise imitation of the elephants’ stance, as they strain their trunks upwards in a pastiche of the military salute, marks him out as irrevocably different (he lacks so much in the nose department!) at the same time as the skill of his mimicry expresses a desire to be at one with the group.
The potential poignancy of this desire becomes more obvious in Mowgli’s interactions with Baloo the bear. Here the range of gestures imitated – roaring, fighting, scratching, dancing, food gathering and singing – forms a much more extended repertoire, emotionally nuanced with lightness of touch and subtlety, and provides the basis for interactive modes of engagement, as opposed to slavish or merely mechanical imitation. Baloo claims he will ‘learn’ Mowgli to act like a bear and indeed the scene in which they form a bond of affection is not only one of the most touchingly brilliant amongst all Disney’s animations but also demonstrates a whole process of enculturation with extraordinary deftness and economy. Mowgli moves swiftly from imitation to exhibiting his own competence in the dubious arts of living to which Baloo introduces him, adding something of his own to the fictive bear modus vivendi, in a form not unlike what Richard Barney, drawing on Bourdieu’s theories, calls ‘regulated improvisation’. Within this mode of learned behaviours the individual, having internalized the main elements of a system of cultural values and practices, becomes able to extend the expressive reach of such values through more spontaneous, variable and responsive kinds of performance (Barney 1999: 14–18).
It might be objected that Mowgli’s ‘imitation’ is not really apprehensible as an expression of wishing to remain at one with the natural world, since the ‘animal’ behaviours he is depicted as mimicking are in fact overwhelmingly human. Yet the dividing line between human and animal behaviours is neither as clear, nor as absolute as it might at first appear. The desire to see animals behaving like humans is surely the mirror image of the human desire to be more attuned to the natural world of animals. Teaching bears to dance and elephants to perform choreographed rituals in the circus diffuses the boundary between the world of nature and culture, just as much as attempts by humans to live in more primitive and empathetic ways within the natural world do in the opposite direction. The animals that Mowgli is depicted as being particularly drawn towards imitating are, in this sense, significant. Elephants and bears have been absorbed into human military and recreational culture for at least two millennia (at times, in singularly cruel ways); these animals display a range of characteristics in the wild that appear highly analogous to human qualities and their capacity to adopt human forms of behaviour in captivity – including dancing, wrestling and fighting – has promoted (albeit ambivalently) a greater sense of intimacy than is commonly available with other animals.
It is this intimacy that is the crucial point at stake in The Jungle Book. The film draws audiences in along a line of desire for closeness – emotional as well as physical – between Mowgli and the animal figures that befriend him. At the same time, the film asserts the critical importance of differences between the various species. These differences are then often used to dramatize dangers and limitations to the project of intimacy, to the playful merging and immersion of the human within animal forms that is such a central element of the film’s emotional appeal. ‘You wouldn’t marry a panther would you?’ Bagheera asks Baloo, in a reductio ad absurdum attempt to persuade the bear that his species-blind intimacy with Mowgli is ultimately untenable. The Jungle Book plays on a series of such oppositions between culture and nature with a lightness of touch that mitigates against serious analysis. Nevertheless, the very pervasiveness of interplay between these underlying themes implies the presence of fundamental structuring principles and a set of preoccupations that are of more than casual concern.
I want to look in more detail now at areas within which the play of such oppositions suggests particular thematic weight. The first of these is the importance attributed in The Jungle Book to the theme of ‘home’. The issue of what constitutes home for Mowgli is clearly of primary significance in structuring the whole narrative. The film opens with a moment of rupture in terms of Mowgli’s attachment to the idea of home within a normal human environment, then develops its storyline by invoking a series of surrogate possibilities (the wolf ‘family’, an itinerant existence with Baloo, enforced captivity with the monkeys and so on) before settling on a return to human civilization within the community of the ‘man village’. In the process of exploring the implications of this range of proffered ‘homes’, a clear opposition is developed. The home that is aligned with Mowgli’s desire is the natural world of the jungle: the spirited young protagonist appears willing to endure almost any degree of privation and exposure in trying to achieve this goal. In opposition to this version of home stands the idea of the human community, the option which the flawed authority figure of Bagheera asserts as the right, responsible choice for Mowgli and the outcome which the ending of the film appears ultimately to endorse. The journey of the film is thus a staging of responses to different images of home, structured around a central, defining opposition.
The film’s staging of responses to home has some highly distinctive features. To begin with the jungle itself is rendered attractively, but also in ways that bring into play particular kinds of association. It is worth noting, in this respect, the degree to which the jungle as landscape is itself less rooted and fixed, more susceptible to fluid, protean shifts of perspective, than are the more naturalistically depicted North American environments of Bambi or The Fox and the Hound. When Mowgli stalks off in fury at Baloo’s apparent betrayal of him towards the end of the film, for instance, the jungle suddenly transforms itself into an arid desert region inhabited by vultures. After the storm that accompanies the final, decisive showdown with Shere Kahn has finished, the terms of this abrupt transition are reversed. The land reverts almost instantaneously to its former lushness, the emotional relief of victory over the dark powers of the tiger apparently enabling the downpour to enact the daily miracle of water’s replenishing plant life with extraordinary, breathtaking rapidity. More generally though, the sense of fluidity of form within the jungle environment is more attributable to artistic style. Robin Allan has suggested that the colours used in Disney’s Jungle Book are reminiscent of the palette of Gauguin. Moreover, he argues that the formal characteristics of the forest itself owe much to the work of Le Douanier Rousseau (1999: 244). These stylistic influences are highly suggestive in terms of the film’s wider thematic concerns. Gauguin and Rousseau’s project of imaginatively embracing tropical landscapes to try to recover a vital, primitive quality, lost to Western civilization, provides an additional layer of thought and feeling to The Jungle Book’s playful depiction of intimacy with animals in an exotic environment projected as a potential ‘home’.
The figurative influence of Le Douanier Rousseau and Gauguin is suggestive in other ways too. Gauguin’s later pictures especially tend to depict versions of dwelling in the world in which the human subjects are peculiarly open to the environment. In part, no doubt, this is a question of climate; there is less need, in a benign tropical climate, for the layers of clothing, the walls, windows and roofs that act as a defence for our bodies against the harsh effects of the surrounding environment. But it is also a question of values. The tropical environment is sought precisely because it enables different kinds of openness, sensitivities and freedom: a deep centring of being in a space where the human body and its more extended habitations appear coterminous with the natural world, rather than struggling to assert themselves against it.
I am not suggesting anything quite so profound is being asserted within the figurative rhetoric of Disney’s films. But most of the Disney narratives with an exotic, natural setting do insist, to a remarkable degree, on the protagonists being positioned in ways that are open to the forces of the wider environment around them. The plot of the recent Pixar computer-generated animation Finding Nemo is entirely characteristic in this respect. The animal protagonists leave the protected home environment of their reef on a quest that takes them to the open seas. The protected environment, when it is reinstated in the narrative, is actually the restricted state of captivity that a fish tank embodies. The open waters of the sea may be dangerous, but this is also a potentially creative space that symbolizes the possibility of freedom and development. It is not only openness to the wider environment, including its hazards, but also the removal of the protected defence of the home environment that appear to be jointly required for the narrative to develop in this type of film.
In the case of Disney’s Jungle Book, the forms of protection offered to the young, infant body of the protagonist are quite exceptionally limited. The baby Mowgli appears initially in a cradle basket, which shares many of the formal qualities of the nest in nature, and the cave-den of his early upbringing offers the same solid protective shape as a human home. But these spaces are glimpsed only in passing at the start of the film. Thereafter, Mowgli’s body is configured within unusually open spaces, even during periods, such as sleep, when it is at its most vulnerable. Mowgli spends his first night away from the wolves on the precarious ledge created by a tree branch. His second night is spent sleeping on the open ground with his animal guardians, Baloo and Bagheera, debating his future nearby. He wears no clothes throughout and carries neither weapons nor devices that would serve either as protective armour or to offer emotional comfort. His skinny arms and legs emphasize his vulnerability, a physical trait that, recent audience research has indicated, makes it difficult for some boys to identify with him as child-hero (Wells, 1998: 235). The extent and form of Mowgli’s exposure to a potentially hostile world are thus remarkable. Even those aspects of his environment that appear to resemble the sheltering and enclosing forms of the home turn out, on closer inspection, to be hostile. The sinuous, caressing coils within which the python Kaa wraps Mowgli’s body are the snake’s prelude to consuming the boy; later, the buildings of the monkey city are revealed as a crumbling, dangerous façade mocking the role of civilized dwellings in nurturing development.
The French philosopher, Gaston Bachelard, has suggested that enclosing forms such as houses, shells and nests are of primary significance in developing the human psyche and its modes of attachment to the world. He writes movingly of the ‘nest’ that has the potential to become, within our imaginative experience, ‘the centre – the term is no exaggeration – of an entire universe, the evidence of a cosmic situation’ (1994: 94). The potential for this psychic connection resides in the relationship between the nest and the body that both forms it – ‘by constantly repeated pressure of the (bird’s) breast’ (ibid.: 101) – and is contained within it. This relationship, in the context of the perceived vulnerability of the nest’s apparently small, frail structure, creates a feeling of connection and of primary confidence: ‘… when we examine a nest, we place ourselves at the origin of confidence in the world, we receive a beginning of confidence, an urge toward cosmic confidence. Would a bird build its nest if it did not have its instinct for confidence in the world?’ (ibid.: 103). Such feelings, Bachelard suggests, connect at the level of dream and memory with the security offered by our human experience of the house. ‘Our house’, he writes, ‘apprehended in its dream potentiality, becomes a nest in the world, and we shall live there in complete confidence if, in our dreams, we really participate in the sense of security of our first home’ (ibid.).
Bachelard’s insights and accompanying phenomenological analysis suggest some interesting questions in trying to understand the significance of the minimal role that forms and spaces associated with nurturing security play within Disney’s Jungle Book. How do we explain the apparent discrepancy between the irrepressible confidence of Mowgli’s desire to remain in the dangerous world of the jungle and the absence of protective forms that, Bachelard suggests, nurture and sustain such confidence? Even though the genre of animated adventure is hardly realistic, we might expect the imagery to provide some analogous experience for the child audience, if the narrative is to be fully emotionally satisfying and successful. Within Bambi, for instance, the enclosed space at the centre of the thicket where the young deer is nurtured and brought up by his mother clearly offers a visual equivalent for Bachelard’s idea of the nest. If similar protective spaces are not available to Mowgli in The Jungle Book, are there any other significant forms that come into play and support an underlying confidence in the world?
One possible area where we might look for such forms lies in the relationship forged between Mowgli and Baloo. Baloo, more than any other character, instils in Mowgli a sense of openness towards the world and the experience it offers. Baloo’s own shape indeed, his large, ambling bulk and the bottom heavy distribution of his body weight that makes him seem firmly rooted to the earth, inspires a kind of loose-limbed confidence. This feeling is greatly extended, however, by the contexts within which Baloo’s interactions with Mowgli are displayed. In the famous ‘Bare Necessities’ song sequence, for instance, Baloo expresses a sense of profound ease in his engagement with the ‘big world’ of his surroundings. But what, exactly, is this ‘ease’ founded on? And, if Baloo’s characteristic modus vivendi is freebooting, open, without apparent need of protective barriers, what does this imply about the experience that the film as a whole offers in connecting viewers imaginatively with images of the wider, natural world?
We need to define more closely what exactly is meant by the ‘bigness’ of the world to which Baloo’s song – and his generally optimistic, easy-going attitude – provide such an engaging entrée. Bachelard has stressed the importance of those moments when we can experience the immensity of the natural world that surrounds us in positive ways, offering a brilliant analysis of the poetry of Baudelaire and Rilke to develop his argument. He points out that the experience of immensity may be particularly associated with the forest, where we so easily lose a sense of direction and precise spatial orientation. This is precisely what happens to Mowgli, of course, when he runs away from Bagheera towards the end of Disney’s film.
It is certainly possible for the art of animation, especially through the judicious use of non-naturalistic devices distinctive to this medium, to engender an analogous experience to the one Bachelard describes. In the Japanese film Princess Mononoke, for instance, the young hero seeks a forest region in which he can make restitution to the ancient guardian spirits with whom humanity (in a parable that invokes the condition of modernity estranged from nature) has broken its links (Napier, 2001). Early in the film the young hero is guided by lesser spirits to a sacred area of the forest. It would take a very detailed analysis of artwork, dramatic and cinematic technique to give a full sense of the impact of this scene, which brings a remarkably fresh viewpoint to that potential cliché of children’s cinema – the enchanted forest. But it is worth mentioning the skilful integration of three devices that perhaps go some way towards accounting for the film’s engendering a much fuller sense of immensity and wonder than are commonly available in animation. Paradoxically, since the feeling engendered is of a mysterious vastness, this involves a restriction, rather than amplification, of key expressive modes available to the director. The first of these restrictions is to point of view. The gaze is directed predominately downwards, towards the roots of the trees, or along the forest floor, so that the sense of a mysterious unseen expansiveness beyond is maintained in the realm of the imagined. This restricted viewpoint is complemented by the extreme steadiness – suggesting stillness of being and concentration – of the protagonist’s gaze. Although the action can be swift at key points in the film, there is also a feeling throughout this scene, indebted partly no doubt to Japanese spiritual and cultural traditions, of restraint in terms of movement. Finally, in the build up to the numinous moment when the animal form of the spirit that presides over the forest is glimpsed, the stillness is reinforced by utter silence on the soundtrack.
Nothing could be further from the expressive modes that characterize Disney’s Jungle Book. Here there is always some business surrounding the characters – even when the principal figure is not moving – while what attunes protagonists to the world around them is more often expressed through variations in rhythm than through stillness. Baloo ducks and weaves around the plants and rocks on the forest floor as he inculcates Mowgli into the pattern of the bear’s life, rubbing his back with deep pleasure against the trunks of palms and swaying into banana trees with his ample hind-quarters so they will release fruit in abundance. Even when Baloo has apparently stopped moving, when he is stretched out on his back in the water extolling the virtues of blissful ease, the camera actually tracks alongside of him as he allows his body to be subsumed in the languid rhythm of the river’s motion. The significance of the rhythms that define Baloo’s way of life become explicit in Baloo’s signature tune, ‘The Bare Necessities’, which is the centrepiece of this episode. The song is not only a comic anthem extolling the virtues of carefree existence: it is also grounded on a distinctive relationship to a world configured with delight as a bountiful larder:
Look for the bare necessities …
Old Mother Nature’s recipes
That bring the bare necessities of life.
Wherever I wander, wherever I roam,
I couldn’t be fonder of my big home;
The bees are buzzing in the trees
To make some honey just for me,
When you look under the rocks and plants
And take a glance at the fancy ants
Then maybe – try a few! …
The bare necessities of life will come to you …
The actions with which Baloo accompanies this bohemian rhapsody exemplify the diversity and range of food resources that the earth makes readily available to this relaxed and dextrous omnivore. The delightful sequence of bum bumping trees to release their harvest, lifting rocks that conceal insect fodder and skilfully paring away the inhospitable outer skins of other exotic delectables reveals a world that is literally ripe for the taking. The sequence is a creative gift for the animators, who transform the ungainly form of the bear into a food appropriator of such extraordinary grace and versatility that the world’s larder appears to fall to him effortlessly.
In a sense of course, as so often with Disney, this is an ancient literary trope that has been wittily appropriated in a new, popular idiom. We do not have to look too far behind Baloo’s joyous natural larder to see the outlines of one of the oldest forms of pastoral conceit, the earth configured in its golden age innocence as a cornucopia. Shakespeare develops this conceit most famously in Gonzalo’s speech in The Tempest, where nature is imagined as bringing forth ‘without sweat or endeavour … All foison, all abundance,/To feed my innocent people’ (II i: 161–5). The trope became a staple of the renaissance lyric, incorporated with particular versatility and wit in the poetry of Andrew Marvell. Here though, the more contemporary, exotic setting of Disney’s jungle relies on a rather different set of associations.
To pursue these associations further I want to concentrate for a while on the image of the humble banana. The banana features in a variety of situations within Disney’s Jungle Book and, perhaps surprisingly, in addition to being one of the film’s most versatile comic props, it is also a richly evocative signifier. In terms of its abundance and accessibility, the banana is the most important of the food resources revealed as so readily available to Mowgli by Baloo. The multiple significations of the banana proliferate, however, in the succeeding episode to the adventure where Mowgli is captured by the monkeys in the Lost City. Here the unfurled skin of the banana features as a mock crown; the fruit is launched repeatedly and at high speed from its skin as a nutritious projectile; it adorns Baloo in his vaudeville costume as pastiche of the dancing native; and it is proffered, then virtually force-fed, to Mowgli as a food item in superabundance by King Louie. The banana and its versatile, slippery skin are a stock item of vaudeville-style jokes. Disney’s film draws richly on this tradition; but beneath all the slapstick humour lies an unease, I would argue, that goes to the heart of the film’s playful exploration of the relationship between nature and culture. For the banana is both a food item in this scene, a gift of nature from the monkeys that parodies traditional rituals of hospitality towards guests, and it is a weapon, deployed to extort knowledge from the captive representative of a higher and more powerful order of species being. King Louie wants the secret of ‘man’s red fire’ from Mowgli and he seems ready to continue firing his mock arsenal of banana artillery at him until he gets it. It is not hard to detect, beneath the carnivalesque animal trappings, the image of something darker here. For what is being rehearsed, surely, is the narrative of a ‘primitive’ society, rich in primary produce deemed to be of little value, seen trying to extort the knowledge that will enable technological development to redress an inherent imbalance of power. This little scene, in other words, is a mini-parable that embodies the major features and tensions of neo-colonialism.
If this interpretation seems a little strained, then it is worth recalling that, alongside its comic attributes, the word ‘banana’ was deployed regularly to denote key areas of American neo-colonial interest and expansionism by the middle of the twentieth century. The ‘banana republic’ had become a populist cliché, referring derogatively to the short-lived regimes of Central American republics whose governments, ironically, were often destabilized by the machinations of United States’ foreign policy. Even more explicitly, historians have deployed the concept of ‘banana wars’ to identify the structural causes shared by a series of US military interventions in Central American countries that began with the Spanish American war. Although the long-term strategy linking these wars was to shore up lines of defence against potential threats from the immediate neighbours of the United States (Musicant, 1990), the ‘banana wars’ epithet gained currency because it recognized substantial economic drives underlying the broader issue of defence. The banana industry was run by some of the largest conglomerate organizations in corporate America. The power wielded by corporations such as the United Fruit Company was (and indeed, in its contemporary form as United Brands, remains) vast. By the 1930s United Fruit owned nearly three and a half million acres of land in Central America – the majority of which was used to produce bananas – an acreage equivalent to about a quarter of an entire country such as Costa Rica or El Salvador (Kepner and Soothill, 1963: 26). In addition to land owned formally, the company’s role in many areas as a virtually monopolistic buyer enabled it to hold what has been described as ‘autocratic sway’ (ibid.: 27) over producers in a much larger territory and to influence substantially the nature and rate of development within countries supplying primary produce. Unsurprisingly, the banana companies were a major lobbying force exercising a decisive influence on US foreign policy and military intervention over a prolonged period.
If the image of the banana is loaded with political significance, then, the culture of banana growing is also, in many ways, both representative and symptomatic of the terms under which the natural world has been developed and farmed in the tropics in the modern world more generally. Like a number of other ‘cash crops’, the banana evolved from its role as a basic food item in subsistence agriculture for local markets under the dual influence of technological advance and demand for imports to the developed world. The enhanced speed of steam ships from the mid-nineteenth century made limited exports of bananas to temperate countries possible, but demand increased exponentially from the late nineteenth century when advances in refrigeration techniques made large-scale transportation feasible. More intensive production for export markets led swiftly to structural features characteristic of third world agricultural production: rapid depletion of the soil, leading to the appropriation of ever greater areas of uncultivated wilderness to maximize yields; enhanced susceptibility to disease, created by intensive farming of a single crop monoculture, that also increased the financial exposure of indigenous producers and intensified dependency on the products of Western agrochemical companies; the erosion of traditional, indigenous cultures and ways of living on the land; and a massive imbalance in terms of the way the market rewards producers and the vested interests of importers/consumers within the developed world. Official figures from 1971, four years after Disney’s Jungle Book was first released, showed, according to Thomson, ‘that in the total amount of economic activity generated by the world banana trade, nearly nine tenths benefits the processes of growth and diverse development of the importing countries, and only one tenth benefits those of the exporting countries’ (1987: 14).
In outlining some of the features characterizing banana production for Western markets, I do not mean to suggest that Disney’s film should bear the whole moral, political and ecological weight of the meanings that accrue. Clearly, the hints of shadows that play across the film’s ebullient surface should not be expanded in significance till they sink the actual viewing experience without trace. But it is worth reviewing the significance of the banana in the world outside the film as a serious, coherent whole because it enables us to view the comic play through which the film engages us from a larger perspective. In the process we may begin to engage with the issues that are finessed and displaced within the film’s narrative more seriously, emphasizing what Edward Said calls the ‘worldliness’ of the text. The barely disguised mini-parable of neo-colonialism at the film’s centre, combined with the extraordinary versatility with which the banana motif is deployed, justify such an approach.
But the film’s images of consumption can be contextualized in other ways too. It is instructive, for instance, to compare Mowgli’s experience with the monkeys in Kipling’s version of the story with that embodied in the film. The monkeys take Mowgli to a space in the city known as the ‘cold lairs’ in Kipling’s story, a name evocative of the place’s estranged, harsh atmosphere. Mowgli is hungry, cold and tired. He asks the monkeys for food:
Twenty or thirty monkeys bounded away to bring him nuts and wild pawpaws; but they fell to fighting on the road, and it was too much trouble to go back with what was left of the fruit. Mowgli was sore and angry as well as hungry, and he roamed through the empty city giving the Strangers’ Hunting Call from time to time, but no one answered him, and Mowgli felt that he had reached a very bad place indeed. (1915: 69)
Kipling’s monkey realm is a harsh, cold place: its anarchic lawlessness fails even to provide food, the most basic requirement of life. The energy generated around Disney’s King Louie, by contrast, though it also tends toward the anarchic and contains an aggressive undercurrent, is both vibrant and in many ways attractive. Baloo is drawn inexorably towards the ‘beat’ of the music that expresses the energies of this realm, and the monkeys, though unfeeling, have both style and chutzpah. Moreover, far from being starved, Mowgli ingests a superfluity of nutrients, even if his diet is limited to the ubiquitous banana. These differences seem to me not simply a question of tone – as a literary version of the traditional tale is transformed into musical comedy – but also stand in significant relation to the historical moments within which the texts were respectively produced.
Disney’s Jungle Book was created within a very different set of historical circumstances to those that prevailed both in Kipling’s era and in the early 1940s, when films like Bambi were being produced. The natural world depicted within Bambi is weighted towards the experience of austerity, an experience made vivid by still recent memories of the Great Depression of the 1930s. By the mid-1960s, on the other hand, America was highly conscious of itself as an affluent society. While unease about the drive towards ever-greater consumerism was growing, providing the main basis for critiques that fuelled a new oppositional politics, mainstream American culture remained grounded on its relation to material wealth and productivity. The Disney Corporation itself was central to the dissemination of this consumer ethos, not only in the United States but also worldwide, having greatly extended its global reach in the post-war years. Although the Corporation continued to sponsor the production of feature animations, from the mid-1950s onwards these constituted a relatively small part of the total business activity and the character of the organization as a whole had changed greatly. The Disney Company had pioneered the mass marketing of products associated with films: ‘The worldwide proliferation of merchandise’ became, as Janet Wasko argues, ‘one of the key features of the Disney Empire’ (2001: 48). By the 1960s, indeed, the Disney brand became virtually a byword for the mass merchandizing of consumer products. By this stage, Disney had become one of the largest corporations in America, a major distributor as well as producer of films with an intensely focused sense of the role that its own image and identity played in the promotion of a vast range of Disney products. While maintaining its image as custodian of family values and innocent, childhood pleasure, Disney also epitomized the intensified market forces that were driving a consumer-orientated society.
By the mid-1960s though, when The Jungle Book was being produced, the drive for ever-greater consumer expansion had begun to generate contradictory feelings and attitudes. While the desire that fuelled demand for consumer products showed no sign of waning, as the US economy underwent strong growth, unease about the effects of such continued expansion had intensified. Critiques of the ‘affluent society’, as the influential American economist J.K. Galbraith memorably termed it, found their way increasingly into populist forms of debate, while a significant youth counterculture – of which the ‘hippies’ were to become the most colourful manifestation – emerged with a set of rather incoherent values, that were nevertheless set in passionate opposition to the main tenets of consumerism.
Within this new cultural climate, the distanced, exotic space of the jungle that Disney ventured into in his last film could be conceived as a relatively safe arena for projecting contradictory feelings about consumption onto the backdrop of the natural world. It is significant then, that the readily available abundance of the world presented in Baloo’s freebooting version of pastoral should be conjured in forms designed largely to make the audience feel comfortable and to inspire feelings of delight. But there are occasional shadows cast across the seeming ease with which the earth gives up its produce, most evident, perhaps, in the images of excessive consumption that accompany the monkeys’ jostling for power. Moreover, the context within which the easy, ‘natural’ consumption of the world’s resources takes place can also be related to aspects of the ideology emerging within new countercultures. Bagheera’s derogatory epithet for Baloo as ‘that shiftless, stupid jungle bum’ places him in the tradition of the hobo tramp that had been extensively mythologized in mid–twentieth-century American literature. Although the hobo’s itinerant, apparently rootless, lifestyle ‘bumming’ around America was scorned in conservative circles, it could also be extolled as a image of freedom, a resource for alternative values to those generated by the staid conformity of an increasingly culturally predominant suburbia. Baloo’s amiable philosophy of travelling light does not only connect with the hobo’s resistance to incorporation within the settled complacencies of contemporary culture, however. The ambling bear’s imagery of a benign earth, generously yielding sustenance to those relaxed enough to trust in its native fecundity, can also be related to the primitive forms of direct connection with nature advocated in hippie ideology. The small communes, idealistically set up to rely on subsistence agriculture, drew on such imagery, while popular song lyrics also regularly invoked the idea of nature, imagined still untouched on the margins of society, as beneficent provider. David Crosby’s apocalyptic song lyric ‘Wooden Ships’, first recorded in 1968, in the spring after Disney’s Jungle Book had been released, includes an exemplary instance of survival by reliance on natural resources after the ordinary social world has collapsed. ‘You must try some of my purple berries: I’ve been eating them for six or seven weeks now’, the lyric confides, adding, with a rather surprised note of cautious optimism, ‘Haven’t got sick once – probably keep us both alive’. The song’s imagined journey to new, uncontaminated shores takes place – in the wake of a nuclear holocaust – on ships made of wood, the organic material of their construction symbolizing a more natural relationship with the earth that must be established on the new land. The image of the wooden ships is conjured in the lyric’s refrain as ‘very free and easy’, an epithet designed to link to the idea of how things should be naturally. ‘Easy, you know the way it’s supposed to be’, the refrain concludes: a rider that, one feels, would have gained Baloo’s full approval.
However, the film imagery’s connection to such ideals, circulating as oppositional alternatives to the affluent, technological society in the late 1960s, is not entirely straightforward. It is counteracted most centrally through the values espoused within Bagheera’s more austere and prudential attitude towards life. In a sense, if Baloo represents a carefree hedonism and optimistic consumption of the world’s resources that was one aspect of 1960s social values in the West, then Bagheera’s attitudes are a legacy of the tougher economic climate that the previous generation had experienced. The dialectic between these contrastive attitudes is not resolved in Disney’s film; if Bagheera is more prudent and ‘responsible’, then Baloo’s responses come across as more emotionally attractive, entertaining and vital. To some extent, this opposition mirrors elements of generational conflict that were coming into sharp focus in 1960s America. The social attitudes of the young, especially those who sought to opt out of conventional consumerist society’s ‘work and spend’ ethic, were regularly criticized by elder spokesmen of the previous generation. The new attitude to work, especially, was seen as irresponsible and feckless in the same way that Bagheera accuses Baloo of being a ‘shiftless bum’. One of the most articulate, though discriminatingly critical, advocates of youth culture in this period, Theodore Roszak, makes a particularly interesting defence of the new attitudes towards work that were emerging:
… a good liberal like Hans Toch invokes the Protestant work ethic to give the hippies a fatherly tongue-lashing for their “consuming but non-contributing” ways. They are being “parasitic”, Professor Toch observes, for “the hippies, after all accept – even demand – social services, while rejecting the desirability of making a contribution to the economy.” But of course they do. Because we have an economy of cybernated abundance that does not need their labor, that is rapidly severing the tie between work and wages, that suffers from hard-core poverty due to maldistribution not scarcity. (1971: 36)
Roszak’s defence of youth counterculture is significant in this context because it highlights an economy whose ‘abundance’ no longer necessitates everyone working in the old patterns; indeed this new economic order is structured so as to enforce non-productive roles within significant portions of the population. If society creates a structural underclass of the unemployed in poor ghettos, so his argument goes, how can it be reprehensible for hippies ‘to enjoy their mendicant idleness’? The problem has become one not of productivity but of the distribution of resources: the ‘economy can do abundantly without all this labour’. What is interesting here is that Roszac’s case depends, in effect, on validating a new kind of ecology within the economic order, one that necessitates participants whose somewhat specialized role is to convert the stigma and poverty associated with enforced idleness into a leisured mode of being that has alternative social value. The foundation of this new role is the abundance of the economy and it is hard not to see parallels here with the life of ease that Baloo advocates, founded as this is on his assured access to the equally abundant store of nature.
There are some important differences here too though. The natural world of Disney’s playground jungle is not simply a palimpsest for American society and, as we have seen, the images of animal forms bring their own associations with them, feeding especially on the fantasy of being self-sufficiently at home within nature. Moreover, the contest of values that is played out around Mowgli’s destiny in the Jungle Book is not located primarily between generations. Baloo and Bagheera are both father figures for Mowgli and, although Baloo’s charismatic charm wins Mowgli’s heart, the film as a whole seems more set up to heal generational differences than to exploit them. Despite his antithetical values, Baloo is eventually persuaded to side with Bagheera and, in a finale reminiscent of Casablanca, the two male animals end up seeking solace as buddies together as they stroll off into the sunset. Nevertheless, the interplay of social values predominates more fully than in a film like Bambi because the degree to which realistic details from natural history are allowed to hold sway has been minimized. The more exotic, distanced natural arena of the jungle allows a purer fantasy to evolve, in which the separation of humans from animals can be removed almost completely.